What goes into the ‘essential DNA’ of Bioshock: Infinite [VIDEO]

Bioshock: Infinite - The 'essential DNA' of Bioshock [VIDEO]

What makes a Bioshock game uniquely and distinctly “Bioshock”?

It’s just this sort of question developers must wrestle with whenever a hit title evolves into a franchise. When developers are tasked with taking a hit game and expanding it into sequels, choices must be made about what to include in future titles, and what needs to be put aside in order to grow the franchise.

But as with any successful series, there are certain elements which players inextricably associate with the franchise; those key features that keep them coming back for more. Maybe it’s a character, or a game play mode, or simply the look and feel of the game’s aesthetic.

When the developers at Irrational Games set out to produce the latest instalment in the Bioshock series, Bioshock: Infinite, the team had to decide what constituted the essential Bioshock DNA. In Bioshock: Infinite — set to launch on Mar. 26 — gone is the familiar underwater world of Rapture, the site of the first two games in the series, and has been replaced with the floating air city of Columbia.

So how does a team take a game known for its claustrophobia-inducing environments and create the same Bioshock look and feel in an expansive open air environment? To get the answer to this question and for a deeper look at Bioshock: Infinite, we recently had the chance to sit down with Shawn Elliott, level designer for Irrational Games, for a discussion about the new game, Marcel Proust and American Exceptionalism.

Check out our video interview with Mr. Elliott above, or scroll down to read an edited transcript of the interview.

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Post Arcade:Set the scene for us. What can users expect from Bioshock: Infinite?

Shawn Elliott: When we set out to make Bioshock: Infinite as a sequel to Bioshock, the first thing we had to do was determine what was the essential DNA of the product. So how similar did it have to be to the original in order to still be a Bioshock game? We knew we didn’t want to go back and do another game set in Rapture, we didn’t want to work with Ayn Rand, because we felt that we had made the statement that we wanted to make there. We had to identify what we call that core DNA. It wasn’t the place, it wasn’t the people, it was the notion behind it, that there is this utopian project of some sort and even more than that, that we desposit the player in this place and let you understand it and experience it for yourself. This is always a problem I run into, with friends and stuff who want to know a lot about the game, they want to know what the character is, what the history is. But so much of the enjoyment from Bioshock games — which we’re now starting to understand, having made two of them at Irrational Games — is that it’s really about the wonder and awe you experience going in on your own for the first time.

PA:Previous versions of the game borrowed heavily from ideas related to Ayn Rand objectivism, but in this game, I’m told we’re dealing with something called American Exceptionalism. What exactly is American Exceptionalism?

SE: It’s really this notion that America occupies a unique place on the world stage and in world history. Again — and this is an idea, this is the notion of American Exceptionalism is, I’m not advocating it or condemning it, just defining it — at the time that the game is set, shortly prior to that is when the notion really started to come into its own. So, around 1893 when the World’s Columbian Exhibition was held in Chicago for example, it was this great coming out party for America to say, we’re taking our place on the world stage, we’re no longer just this backwater where we grow crops and nothing else. We’re a country that is about to produce the Wright Brothers and Henry Ford … Thomas Edison was actually there showing a number of his works, and it was a time characterized by a great sense of hope, I think, and the notion that the sky was the limit. So we made that literal in our case. But yeah, at that exposition it was really about painting the future of America as anything we can imagine, as long as it’s very, very grand and very, very self important.

PA:Other game franchises, like Assassin’s Creed, have historians on their teams to help out with the design of games and the stories. Do you have anyone overseeing those elements?

SE: On the high level, I know that it’s encouraged that everyone in the studio engages with history and different sources of inspiration. So when I first joined, and we’re going on five years now, everyone was passing around copies of The Devil in the White City … it’s basically a non-fiction account of a murder mystery that coincides with that Columbian Exposition I was talking about. Similarly, when I first started, the notion was we were going with art nouveau; where art deco defined what was the single architectural statement that defined the look and aesthetic of Rapture, art nouveau would be the same for Bioshock Infinite. At that time … everyone at the time was just devouring art books on that. We’d have art historians come in. Being based out in Boston, we happen to be right near a number of awesome universities so we can have professionals come out and talk to us about how electric lights were used when they were first introduced. One interesting thing [with respect to electric light bulbs] is we’re so used to now, and we’re at a point in time where it’s so mundane you just conceal it. You don’t want a bare light blub anywhere because we associate that with poverty. It’s what hangs in your fridge with the baking soda when you’re broke. But at the time [the game is set], you wanted to show that you had it; it was remarkable. So that Coney Island look where everything is garish by today’s standards … so that’s an example of something that would inform our artists. We think it’s important that everyone on staff is exposed to this stuff, because really, knowing the history is not just limited to somone writing dialogue, it’s going to impact the work that we put into the appearance of every item in the game to just the way that people behave and the general sense and atmosphere.

PA:Let’s take a step back for a second. Video games are an amazing medium because they enable all kinds of different storytelling. Could this story have been told as effectively in another medium? What about the games makes it the right way to tell a story like this?

SE: Going back to that core DNA of Bioshock, it’s about placing someone somewhere and not telling you what it was like for someone else to have been in this space, but to let you experience it on your own. To get a little bit pointy headed here, one of my favourite writers, at least in my undergrad days, Marcel Proust, wrote that the mark of great art is not someone who tells you about a trip to Mars, but rather something that takes you to Mars to experience it for yourself. I think video games are a perfect match for that sort of thinking. As far as art goes where we put you in this place and where you look and where you turn — obviously there are limitations, even in open world games have walls at some point — but you feel a great sense of a self guided tour of something that is strange and unfamiliar to you, but with maybe little shimmers of things that you recognize. It’s hard to capture the feeling of walking around and experiencing a place yourself, it’s just not the same to observe it and to observe someone else doing it.

PA:Make the case for mainstream appeal. What will make this game stand out in as a piece of meaningful entertainment in ways that other games haven’t?

SE: I can’t speak about other games, but I know for us and for our standards, we don’t set out to make, we certainly don’t create allegory where there’s a one-to-one relationship between the symbolism we use and the meaning in the present context. But what we want to do is push people to think, and I think again, another qualification for art is that you’re engaging people to come to their own conclusions about what it is that they’re interacting with and that’s just been important for us all along. We want to push buttons, it’s not trying to be provocative for the sake of being provocative, but it’s about saying this is material that we think is serious, it means something to us and we want to see how you digest it and how you interact with it.

PA:What can players expect from the gameplay? In the first Bioshock game, the player was for the most part being directed by a voice over the radio. Is there someone else pulling the strings this time?

SE: I think everyone who has played it so far has said, ‘Oh, this is Bioshock, I can definitely tell that this is Bioshock.’ And at the same time, they say that at the same time it’s just very different. Part of that has to do with the difference between going from an undersea environment with corridors and roofs to expanses of open air with skylines that allow you to traverse that space with very high speeds. Of course we still have some interior environments that give you a more moody feel as well. That is extremely different. And unlike Bioshock one, you don’t have the equivalent of Fontaine talking to you over a recorder the entire time and guiding you, because Booker, the player character is able to speak this time, and Liz is going to be there with you the entire time, the interactions of those two characters will often give you information you need to know about your larger objectives, but without telling you: I need to go do this exactly right now. They help fill in the picture of what the possibility space is, what I should probably think about doing right now. In some cases it might be specific, we need to do this in order to get out of here, and really part of it’s just the interactions between those two characters.